The work of Japan’s tattoo masters, the horishi – where the gaze of the shogunate did not reach

Japanese horishi in the Edo period – who were the tattoo masters working above bathhouses and in the back alleys of Yoshiwara, how did they operate beyond the shogunate’s gaze, and how was their craft different from punitive irezumi?

Not irezumi and not yakuza

Japanese tattoos? Our first thought is "irezumi (入れ墨)" – a word as heavy as a sentence handed down by the shogunate authorities, smelling of prison and, somewhat later, of yakuza and "no entry" signs at the onsen. We less often think of the stifling rooms above sentō bathhouses in Edo times, of bamboo sticks tipped with needles, of men who spent their entire lives bent over someone’s skin as though over a delicate woodblock print. And yet at the source of this "forbidden" art we do not find mafia legends, but quiet craftsmen – shokunin called horishi (彫師), literally "masters of engraving", who treated the human body as a kind of cherrywood block for ukiyo-e, only more capricious, mobile and difficult.

In an era when official morality declared: "You received your body from your parents; you must not mutilate it" – an echo of a Confucian maxim repeated in the schools – those same streets of Edo were full of men and women who emerged from the bathhouses draped in images of dragons, carp, and the heroes of "Suikoden". The state carved harsh symbols of sentences into the skin of criminals – irezumi-kei, "penal tattooing" – while a few streets away the same verb horu ("to carve, to engrave") was forming other words: horimono (彫り物), "a carved thing", wabori, "Japanese carving". Language reflected the tensions of the age: one word for stigma, another for pride; one for the violence of the official, another for the quiet skill of a craftsman from a side street in Yoshiwara.

Today we will not be admiring "the dark tattoos of the yakuza" or analysing the iconography of dragons and waves – we have already spoken about that before. Today we are going a step lower, to the level of hands, sweat and the rhythm of breathing. We are interested in the workshop of an Edo horishi: a working day of a Japanese shokunin – craftsman (artist?) – his language, his relationship with his clients – the tobi and hikeshi from the firefighting crews, the hikyaku couriers, the courtesans of Yoshiwara and the proud otokodate, the city’s "chivalrous ruffians". We will try to hear the sound of tebori – hundreds of tiny pricks of a bamboo needle – and to see how, in a world of harsh edicts and sumptuary laws, it was precisely these most modest craftsmen who were able to "cut" into human skin their own version of a story about courage, loyalty and resistance to injustice. Let us get to know the tattooists of Japan in the time of the Tokugawa shogunate.

SCENE

In the horishi’s workshop

Summer evening came to Edo lazily, slowly withdrawing the colours from the street. Outside one could still hear the drawn-out cries of tofu sellers, the heavy steps of water carriers, the creaking of norimono with passengers returning from the sentō bathhouse. In a narrow side street behind Yoshiwara, where the houses were lower and the canal smelled of damp wood and charcoal smoke, one window shone with an exceptionally bright light.

On the ground floor there was a modest sentō. From between the blue noren curtains a billow of steam escaped into the street, along with the sweet smell of suds and wet pine from the tubs. Above the bathhouse, up steep stairs scrubbed to a dark sheen that ran along an old wall, there was a small room known in the neighbourhood only to trusted people. There was no sign on the door – only a crumpled, long-faded piece of paper with the owner’s name, not the real one from the koseki (戸籍, family register), but a pseudonym, the so-called genji-na (源氏名, literally "name from Genji (Monogatari)", that is, a stage name).

Inside it smelled different than downstairs. Heavier. Deeper. A mixture of black sumi ink, oil, sweat, iron and something that resembled wet ash. By a low table lit by the faint light of an oil andon lamp sat a man with a surprisingly calm face. They called him Horikichi, a nickname given by his clients – he did not use it when he went in the morning to buy rice at the market, but here, above the bathhouse, he was a horishi (彫師, literally "master of engraving").

His hands betrayed his past. On his fingers were traces of small cuts, and hard calluses on his thumb from years of gripping wooden blocks. Before he began "carving" in skin, he carved cherrywood blocks for ukiyo-e. Now cherrywood had been replaced by living, warm flesh, but the movements of his hand remained the same: careful, methodical, as if he still heard in his head the dry crack of splinters falling away.

On the tatami in front of him lay a man whose age was hard to guess. A typical hikeshi – a city fireman, but also a tobi, a man of scaffolds and roofs. His shoulders were broad from work, the skin on his back darker from working on roofs in the sun. Now his body, usually hidden under a thick happi and sash, lay naked, only girded with a fundoshi. The dampness from his bath in the sentō was still visible on his body; drops slowly ran down his side and disappeared into the tatami.

On his back the entire scene had already been sketched out – thin bluish sumi lines formed the outline of a carp climbing against the current, of streams of water, of eddies that would only later gain depth. Just a moment earlier, while there was still more light, the horishi had applied the shitae: he had gently drawn the brush over the skin as though drawing on paper. Only now, when the design was fixed, did he reach for the tool that distinguished him from an ordinary draftsman.

In his right hand he held a bamboo rod – moderately thick, smoothed by so many years of touch that it shone. At its end, intricately wrapped with silk, gleamed a cluster of fine needles. They did not look threatening. Just a few thin metal pins. But when he dipped them into the black pool of sumi in the bowl to his left, the ink seized the steel like a shadow.

With his left hand he stretched the client’s skin. Fingers that had once pressed paper against a block now spread living muscle. The right began its delicate, rhythmic work. The movement was not a vertical stabbing, as a layperson imagines, but a smooth rocking of the wrist: the needles entered the skin at an angle, in series of quick touches, like rain.

The sound was quiet but distinct. The kind you only hear up close: a moist "pch, pch, pch" as the metal pierced the epidermis, mingled with the rustle of breathing and the creak of the mat. Every few moments the horishi would pause, reach for a damp cloth and with a single practised motion wipe away the mixture of ink and a thin trickle of blood. In place of the pale outline there appeared a saturated, deep black.

"Don’t move, Gen-san," he said gently, without taking his eyes off the spot where the carp was to cut across the stream. "If you start jumping around like at a fire, the water will come out crooked. And if the water is crooked, then happiness runs away too."

The client let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a hiss of pain.

"I’ve spent so many years scrambling over roofs, and still I’m more afraid of that needle of yours than of fire…," he muttered through his teeth. "Just make sure that carp protects properly. The last fire in Nihonbashi… we almost lost the whole crew."

The horishi nodded so imperceptibly that nothing in the movement of his hand changed. He could tell stories about the fires of Edo as easily as about "Suikoden". The city was made of wood, paper, dry matting – it burned often and fast. That was precisely why the tobi and hikeshi came to him for water on their backs: dragons, waves, carp climbing waterfalls. Just in case the fire deities really were watching.

In the corner of the room, half hidden behind a folding screen, sat a young boy. He was doing what his hands had previously done in the woodblock workshop: preparing. At his side he had a whetstone and a small block of sumi, which circled over the surface of a ceramic bowl, leaving behind an ever denser pool of ink. From time to time the boy glanced at the client’s back – not out of curiosity, but from a mixture of admiration and envy. He knew that before they would allow him to touch someone’s skin with needles, years would pass in grinding ink, binding needles, washing bloody cloths. This was the path of the shokunin (職人, literally "a person of the craft").

On the wall opposite hung a couple of crumpled ukiyo-e prints: heroes of "Shinpen Suikogaden", several of whom looked out from the paper clothed in tattoos from nape to ankles. Kuniyoshi drew them sharply, dynamically, and the fine lines of the woodblock carver carried that sharpness into the wood. Now the horishi carried it further still – from wood to flesh. The prints had found their way into the room thanks to one of his clients, an otokodate (男伊達), a "street knight" from a nearby district, who had lugged them in one day with the enthusiasm of a child: "I want one like this! Exactly like this Shishin!" The horishi had merely smiled. There was no "exactly like this". There was only what the body would allow.

"Did you hear, sensei?" the boy in the corner suddenly blurted out, unable to bear the silence. "They say Kuniyoshi has put out a new series again. They’re already selling it at the shop by the little bridge. They say this time even more heroes have tattoos."

"Mhm," the horishi grunted, without taking his eyes off Gen-san’s back. "You can bring it when you’ve scraped together some coins. Those pictures aren’t for you. They’re for the clients."

He knew that every new sheet from "Suikoden" meant a few new wishes: "Just the arms", "just the back", "all the way down to the thighs". There were those who came in with the idea of a full suit of armour from the start – donburi, munewari, hikae – and those who began with a small irebokuro on the wrist, with the name of a woman encoded in a single character. The horishi had seen some of them return years later, with a blurred mark from moxibustion where a former "eternal love" had been, asking him to cover it with something larger. A dragon was easier to live with than someone else’s name.

"I’m going to press a bit harder now," he warned calmly. "Can you take it?"
Gen-san exhaled, his cheeks turning pale.
"What choice do I have…," he gasped. "Do it. If it has to be done."

Gaman. Endure. The horishi knew that moment when ordinary pain turns into something else: a kind of trance in which the breath lengthens and the muscles stop fighting and instead begin to cooperate with the hand. This was the part of the work he would never be able to explain to any official.

Outside, a clatter rolled past: somewhere a litter thumped, someone rasped out a fragment of a street song about a courtesan who betrayed her lover and about gold that was lost. From the ground floor came the splash of water and laughter. Edo lived, roared, amused itself. Here, in this small room above the sentō, something was happening that fit neither the official morality of Confucian treatises nor the edicts of the bakufu.

The horishi did not think of himself as a rebel. On paper he appeared as an ordinary craftsman, a shokunin, like a cooper or a carpenter. But he knew that what he did placed his clients on the other side of an invisible line. A man with a full horimono on his back was no longer "someone" who could be quickly forgotten. He had become a story – about courage, about foolishness or wisdom, about feeling, about the desire to be something more than a cog in the machinery of the city.

"Another two, three winters and the whole back will be finished," he said quietly, straightening his own shoulders a little. "Then we’ll move on to the shoulders. Only then will your comrades find out what real armour means."

Gen-san smiled, though sweat was running down his pale temple.
"If the fire ever takes us," he muttered, "at least the water deities will know whom they’ve let into the river."

The horishi did not answer. He only dipped the needles in the ink again, tensed his muscles and continued his quiet work.

Japanese tattooists

There are words in a language that sting like a needle. In the world of Edo, one of them was irezumi. Most often written today as 入れ墨, it is composed of the simple verb 入れる – "to put in, to insert" – and 墨, that is, black sumi ink. Brutally literal. Not an ounce of beauty, not an ounce of craftsmanship. Exactly the sort of word the apparatus of power needed when, in Tokugawa times, people spoke of irezumi kei, the punishment of branding the body. You can feel the chill of bureaucratic language, of registers and sentences.

It is no wonder that the people who made tattooing into a craft and a form of pride were searching for other words. One of them was horimono – 彫物. 彫 (horu) means "to carve, to cut, to engrave", a character familiar from the workshops of woodblock carvers. 物 (mono) – "thing, object". Together: "a carved thing". Suddenly the body disappears from the foreground. It is no longer "putting ink into the skin", but an object, a composition, a work. The perspective shifts: the body is not a site of punishment, but a surface on which the craftsman’s hand works.

From the same trunk grows the word wabori – 和彫り. 和 (wa) is Japan, "that which is Japanese", but also "harmony" (why Japan is "wa"? – more on that here: Why Do We Say "Japan" While the Japanese Say "Nihon"? From Oyashima to Zipangu – A Millennia-Long Game of Telephone); 彫り (bori) – from "horu", to carve. Wabori is thus "Japanese carving", "Japanese engraving": not a technical description of the procedure, but a declaration of belonging. The opposite of yōbori, Western machine tattooing. In those two syllables – wa and bori – an entire manifesto is contained: what we do is tied to the local aesthetic, to "Suikoden", to the dragons known from fusuma and to Hokusai’s waves, not to the anchors of sailors from Yokohama.

Alongside them appears the more poetic shisei – 刺青. 刺 (sasu) – "to stab, to prick, to thrust in", 青 (ao) – blueness, green, "a livid colour". "Pierced blueness." At that time quite literally: over the years the black of sumi would turn into a bluish-green tint beneath the skin. In this one neat compound you can see both the pain and the result: the prick after which a cool, blue echo remains. This word will later sound in Tanizaki, becoming literary, noble (more on Tanizaki here: "In Praise of Shadows" by Tanizaki – Let Us Touch the Japanese Beauty of Twilight, So Different from the Western Aesthetic of Light). But in Edo it functioned above all within the circle of people who knew what a healing line looks like under a layer of ointment.

There is also the old, almost archaic bunshin – 文身. 文 is "pattern, ornament, writing", 身 – "body". "Pattern on the body", "ornament of the body". An echo of the ancient descriptions of Wa from Chinese chronicles, but also something very close to how the young helpers of the horishi thought of themselves: the body as parchment. Hence the title bunshinshi – 文身師, another self-designation of the tattoo master: no longer "carver" but "one who adorns the body with pattern". In both cases – 彫師 and 文身師 – the ending 師 ("shi") is the same: master, teacher, a person of the craft.

It is interesting that almost all of these words push aside what is visible from the perspective of an official or a preacher: sin, crime, dirt. Instead, they speak of action and art: carving, patterning, piercing, enduring. Even one of the colloquial terms for a full-body tattoo – gaman – 我慢 – arises from this logic. Literally: "endurance, patient perseverance" (我 – I, self; 慢 – to endure, to hold out). In Japan this word is used to describe a child sitting politely in a waiting room, bearing the heat in a train… and long hours of tebori sessions. Sometimes the horimono itself is called "gaman": not only an image, but a story of pain that someone has consciously taken upon themselves.

When a horishi introduces himself to a client, he is unlikely to call himself an "artist". In the world of Edo, the Western myth of the artist-genius floating above craft did not yet exist. The tattooist was a shokunin – 職人: a person of a trade – a hand that repeats the same movements for years until it achieves its own, recognisable style. Woodblock carvers were also called horishi – 彫師, but their names were often missing from the sheets; on the border one could proudly read 絵師 – eshi, the author of the drawing. A sign painter was simply a kanban-ya, a signboard man. In this hierarchy the horishi-tattooist was situated somewhere between the splinters of the workshop and the steam of the sentō: high in the eyes of clients, low in the official social order.

That is why the words he uses to speak about himself are so important. Irezumi remains outside: it is the word of the policeman, the notice at the entrance to the bathhouse – irezumi okotowari – "tattoos forbidden". The horishi of Edo, and later their students down to the present day, prefer to speak of horimono, of wabori, of shisei. These words are like an invisible but tangible dividing line: irezumi – on one side, stigma; horimono – on the other, a craft with its own code, rules of composition, a "grammar" of dragons and waves.

This difference has survived to this day. Contemporary masters whose full backs of dragons and oni are admired around the world often say outright that they do not like the word irezumi. They still hear in it the echo of 入れ墨刑, the punishment of branding. Today "irezumi" therefore does not refer to all tattoos, but to a very specific niche – yakuza tattoos (you can read more about irezumi here: Irezumi: The Japanese Art of Ukiyo-e Masters in Yakuza Tattooing). They prefer to speak of wabori, of their horimono, of being horishi. And when someone tries to force the label "artist" onto them, they react almost allergically. To their ears the word is too light, too fashionable, too Instagrammable. Shokunin sounds heavier, but truer: it carries the awareness that every motif – every wave, scale, petal of a peony – is at once a repetition of tradition and someone’s real pain.

The language of this craft/art is therefore not only a set of names for techniques. It is an entire defence system against the way the rest of society looks at them.

In the horishi’s workshop

The horishi’s workshop rarely looked like a temple of art. It was more like a combination of an ordinary craftsman’s room, a storeroom and a small treatment room. The day began before the first client managed to slide open the fusuma ("open the doors"). First came sumi ink (墨) – without it there is nothing. The horishi would take a stick of black ink from a small box, the same kind used by a calligrapher, but intended for the skin. He would slowly grind it on a stone base, adding a little water. One often reads that the sound of sumi grinding against the suzuri was experienced as almost meditative – dry, rustling, steady. The density of the ink had to be different than for writing: not too thin, so that it would not spread in the skin, and not too thick, so that the needles could catch it. Nearby, in a separate little vessel, shu (朱) would appear from time to time – cinnabar, a red pigment with an ill repute, which had to be roasted and "purified" for a long time so that it would not cause fever. The early Edo horishi knew only these two colours: black, which with time turned bluish, and red, used sparingly, like incense in a temple.

Then came the time for hari (針). It is easy to say "needles"; in practice, each "pen" for tebori was a small tool built from scratch. The horishi sat in the morning light, took a thin bamboo rod, split the tip and into that split groove slid a few or a dozen needles – straight, in a fan, depending on whether they were to be used for outlining or for shading. Wrapping them with fine silk, lacquering so that everything held together; testing on a scrap of paper how the line went in, whether the mark was even. These were not disposables – the life of the needles ended only when the material was truly worn out. The daily routine: check, adjust, sharpen. The woodblock craftsman sharpened his chisels – the horishi sharpened his needle "brushes".

No less important were the hikae – pattern books. Old albums of "Suikoden" heroes, redrawn dozens of times from Kuniyoshi’s woodblocks, lay in a chest wrapped in paper so they would not catch moisture. On the wall there might hang a rolled-up kakejiku (掛軸) with a dragon or Fudō Myōō; not to impress clients, but as a reminder of proportions, the arrangement of flames, the rhythm of the line. When someone "from the street" came in and said only: "something with water" or "I want to be like that hero who breaks the beam", the horishi reached precisely for these sketchbooks, for his reworkings. The difference between working "live" and blindly copying ukiyo-e was enormous. Paper does not sweat, does not tremble, does not twist around the shoulder blade. For the horishi, the body was a kind of difficult, crooked and mobile paper – he had to know in advance how the dragon would "pass" over the shoulder blade, how the wave would lie on the buttock, which does not exist on the woodblock sheet.

The actual work – tebori (手彫り) – began only when everything was already prepared. The left hand tightened the skin – thumb, index finger, the centre of the palm constantly changing grip to find the right tension. The right hand performed short, rhythmic movements: not "pecking", as people today imagine it, but smooth pushing of the needles at an angle, in series of several, a dozen punctures, like miniature stitching. To an outsider it sounded, according to Japanese onomatopoeia, like this: saka-saka-saka. With breaks to wipe away ink and to breathe. Contours, then shading, sometimes a final red accent of cinnabar. Hours during which little was said – because the client saved his breath – or, on the contrary, there was chatter to distract the mind from the pain.

For the horishi, technique did not end with the "drawing" itself. He had to be able to manage someone else’s gaman (我慢). He knew the limits of the body – when muscle tension became too hard, when the breath quickened. He knew when to end the session, even though there was still so much left to fill. A full munewari (a suit with a chest opening, like the modern yakuza style) or donburi (complete coverage of the body, including stomach and chest) did not emerge in a single season – sometimes it went on for years. One had to plan the "map of pain": first the back, then the shoulders, only later the stomach, the ribs. One had to watch over healing: warn the client against bathing in water that was too hot, recommend ointments, observe how the skin reacted to sumi and shu. If something did not heal – that was also the responsibility of the horishi. The craft encompassed not only lines, but also regeneration. The horishi therefore had to be, in part, a doctor as well.

Among the clients who passed through such workshops, each was a world unto himself. A tobi – a scaffolding labourer, often also a hikeshi – a fireman – sat on the tatami differently from a small merchant from Nihonbashi. The tobi usually came in groups, with the boisterous energy of the suburbs. In their bodies the horishi saw the weight of work at heights, the spread of shoulders used to carrying beams. For them, water motifs were natural: waves, koi carp, dragons calling down rain. Not only because "water extinguishes fire", but because the whole of Edo feared fire – and they faced it head-on. Tattooing a tobi, the horishi knew that this skin would be seen on rooftops, as water was poured over burning houses, amid shouted orders. His lines became part of the city’s spectacle.

The hikyaku (飛脚) – couriers running through the city in nothing but fundoshi (more about them here: The Shogunate’s Reliable Couriers – Hikyaku and the Carrier Market of Medieval Japan) – were another type. Less money, but great pride in a body "trained by running". For them the horishi composed tattoos like a second garment: bands of waves encircling the thighs, motifs that accentuated the movement of the muscles. Craftsmen – carpenters, joiners, boatmen – tended to be more cautious. Their choices often followed fashion but were also shaped by what they saw in ukiyo-e: the heroes of "Suikoden", battle scenes, sometimes Fudō Myōō himself or other guardian deities. Looking at their faces and hands, the horishi could roughly tell how much they could spend and how far their "gaman" would take them. Sometimes he would suggest a compromise: first a large, strong motif on the back, we will fill in the background "when you’ve earned for the next season".

A separate chapter were the kyōkaku (侠客) and the various otokodate (男伊達), the "street knights". They came with pride and with ready-made images of themselves as heroes. They wanted what the bandits in "Suikoden" had: a dragon over the whole arm, a tiger on the back, a demon on the thigh. The horishi knew that for them the tattoo was a symbolic weapon – a way to become, the moment the shirt came off, someone who commanded respect. The choice of motifs was therefore a subtle game: a petty thug who asked for a powerful dragon might hear a quiet suggestion that "this dragon would sit better on someone with broader shoulders", and end up with a carp fighting the current, a hero a little less ostentatious but far more believable.

The horishi also worked with bodies from outside the masculine world of the streets. Yūjo (遊女) rarely commissioned large horimono – their skin was covered anyway by multi-layered kimono – but the irebokuro (入れボクロ), "written moles", were well known: tiny dots of ink on the hand near the thumb, sometimes a discreet mark on the wrist. For the courtesan it was an investment in the client’s attachment; for him – proof that he was "the special one".

In the background of all these commissions there pulsed another important layer: communal pride. In many Edo neighbourhoods the danna-shū (旦那衆) – the local, wealthier townsmen – would pool money to pay for a young tobi’s first larger tattoo. Not because they loved art, but because their "own" firefighting unit was meant to be "the most splendid" at fires and matsuri. Shared designs – the same dragon, the same layout of waves, the same type of cloudy background – became a sort of district coat of arms. For the horishi this meant he was working not only for an individual client, but for an entire invisible community that would proudly display his compositions in the glow of paper lanterns.

In this way, the horishi’s everyday life stretched between two extremes: the microscopic detail of a needle dipped in sumi, and the wide social picture of Edo, in which every tattooed body meant something – status, courage, belonging, rebellion. For him, the client’s body was always at once paper, map, and living human being, whose pain had to be measured out wisely. And perhaps it was precisely for this reason that the horishi so stubbornly called himself a shokunin, a craftsman, and not an artist: because his work began long before the first puncture and ended only when the skin had healed and returned to the bathhouse, to the street, to the rooftop – showing the world what had been "carved" into it.

Edo prices and the shogunate’s regulations

In that same Edo where a bakufu official would order a convict to be brought in and have a thick character "犬" burned into his forehead, or a black band around his forearm, a few streets away a horishi was bending over someone’s skin with a completely different intention. Irezumi-kei – punitive "marking" – was quick, brutal, performed in public to shame and exclude. A one-time act of power: a few cuts with a knife, ink rubbed in, the scream of the crowd. In this language the body was the shogunate’s noticeboard: "this person is guilty". The horishi worked in the opposite way: slowly, quietly. Similar tools – needle, ink – but a different ethic. Where the bureaucrat’s hand wrote a sentence, the horishi composed a story: about bravery, loyalty, about the idea that a person is something more than his crime or social class.

The paradox of the era lies in the fact that the more the bakufu tried to impose order on the city with marks on foreheads and arms, the more the culture of horimono grew in the shadows. In the years when edicts listed prohibitions against overly luxurious fabrics, extravagant hairstyles, overly gleaming swords (you can read more about Edo sumptuary laws here: Sumptuary Laws in the Time of the Shogunate, or How Prohibitions Stirred the Defiant Creative Genius of the Japanese) – no one wrote explicitly about full bodysuits hidden under a yukata.

When attempts were made to curb "dissolute and frivolous customs", they targeted rather the visible forms of opulence: brocade obi, gold embroidery, colours reserved for higher classes. Horimono was the perfect cheat: the true "success" of a tattoo consisted in the fact that by day it disappeared under a layer of cloth and appeared only in the bathhouse, by a bowl of sake, in a private room. That is why many horishi were officially "woodblock carvers", "sign painters", or simply "the craftsman from around the corner". The signs above their doors spoke of sandal repair, paper sales, minor writing services; their real name travelled in whispered circulation: from tobi to hikyaku, from bathhouse to teahouse.

In the eyes of the authorities, every trace of ink on the body was potentially suspicious – for how could one distinguish penal irezumi from rebellious horimono? But in practice a quiet line emerged: harsh, clumsy sentence marks, usually in visible places, and delicate, elaborate compositions filling backs, shoulders, thighs. The official wanted to mark "on the surface", the horishi specialised in what was hidden. Both could hurt equally, but the meaning of the pain was different: here humiliation, there an attempt to transcend one’s own fear, gaman put to the test by dozens of hours under the needle. It is no wonder that for many firefighters, otokodate or kyōkaku the tattoo became a private "counter-law" against the markings of the system: if an old line from a sentence was visible on the forearm, the horishi could wrap it in waves, a cloud, the scales of a dragon, so that it was no longer the main focus.

Behind this aura of secrecy, however, there lay a very down-to-earth economics. The horishi was not a romantic outsider living on air, but a concrete cog in Edo’s economy. For a full munewari from shoulders to knees one paid 5–7 ryō – an amount the average farmhand might only ever see in an illustration in an arithmetic primer at a terakoya. Tobi and hikeshi belonged to the better-paid groups: for extinguishing fires and carrying beams they could scrape together money for a tattoo from their own pockets. There were times, however, when the district’s danna-shū – wealthier merchants and house owners – would chip in for a young tobi’s first horimono, as though they were sponsoring armour made of pigment and pain. It was an investment in prestige: when such a boy leapt into the flames with a naked, dragon-covered chest, not only did he look braver – the whole neighbourhood grew in stature.

Work on a single body could stretch over months, sometimes years. The economy of tattooing was an economy of the long breath. First a deposit for the sketch and linework – the outline of the entire scene. Then the client would return every few days or weeks, depending on his wallet and pain threshold. The horishi had to be able to calculate no worse than a merchant: to know how many hours of work were hidden in an as-yet unshaded dragon, how many sessions it would take to fill the waves on the thighs, how many instalments a tobi could manage, who between one fire and the next drank away part of his day’s wages. It happened that someone disappeared after the outline – leaving on his skin a forever "unfinished" image and an unpaid balance. After a few such cases, every horishi developed his own, very pragmatic ethics of taking commissions.

The workshop was not a one-man hero’s stage. Besides the master there were apprentices – at first boys who cleaned, ground sumi on the stone suzuri to the right density, cut and tied bundles of needles for tebori. They prepared the thin bamboo shafts, learned how to bind the needles with thread so they would hold at the right angle, how to wash the points over steam, how not to waste a single drop of costly cinnabar. The first lines they were allowed to draw on living skin were not a dragon on a back at all – rather a small irebokuro or a fragment of background on the thigh of a regular client who "allowed them to practise". Gradually they moved from outlining to simple shading, from maple leaves on a shoulder to waves around a carp on a shoulder blade. Only after years would the master give them "faces" – quite literally: he allowed them to fill in the faces of the "Suikoden" heroes on clients’ backs, because there even the tiniest mistake was immediately visible.

This profession also lived on secrecy and selection. A decent horishi did not need a flashy signboard: he worked "by recommendation". Someone who came in off the street without a referral might hear that "the master is not taking new commissions". Or even that this was not a horishi’s workshop at all, but, for example, a woodblock carver’s. There were unwritten rules: not to tattoo children, not to place designs in visible spots on officials, who would risk losing their posts, to be wary of people who boasted too loudly about their criminal exploits. A horishi could freely work for kyōkaku – the street "knights" – but he approached with caution those who only wanted a tattoo to intimidate others. In this sense he was a kind of aesthetic-moral judge: he decided whether a given person was "worthy" of such armour.

At the other pole were closed circles of regular clientele, which over time began to resemble formal associations. Already in the later era, after the fall of the shogunate, the emergence of groups such as Edo Chōyūkai – bringing together wearers of one master’s works, meeting once a year to present their horimono together to the gods at a shrine – was merely a continuation of what was born in Edo: a relationship in which the horishi’s name becomes a kind of coat of arms for an entire group. In such an arrangement the horishi is not just a service provider; he is someone who – needle by needle – carves the visible history of a single class, a single district, a single brotherhood.

The Old Can Work with the New

In today’s tebori studios you can still hear the echo of those cramped rooms above the sentō and the side alleys of Yoshiwara, even though neon now shines where oil lamps once did, and clients arrive in hoodies rather than in fundoshi. Many things have changed – pigments are safer, needles are sterile, and appointments are booked via apps – but the language used to describe the craft has been consciously left unchanged.

On the lips of contemporary masters, the words horimono, wabori, gaman still circulate; a horishi still rarely calls himself an āchisuto (artist), more often a shokunin. Horiyoshi III (Nakano Yoshihito, b. 1946) has often said that he understands his work through the prism of shu–ha–ri: first faithful adherence to the rules, then their creative "break", and finally the creation of one’s own world – exactly as the old masters did, who translated Kuniyoshi’s drawings onto skin rather than simply copying them.

Interestingly, although tattooing in postwar Japan has been legalised, many contemporary ateliers still look like a slightly modernised version of an Edo-era room. There is often no sign, only a surname on the intercom, and the entrance looks like that to an ordinary apartment – just as, in the past, the workshop above the bathhouse did not draw the eye of passers-by. The path to the master usually leads through a private recommendation, not through advertising. The very term irezumi is still avoided by many of today’s tebori-shi, reserved rather for stigma, the history of punishments, newspaper headlines; when they speak of their work, they use horimono or wabori, as though language were an extra line of defence for a craft they want to separate from associations with sentencing or cheap sensation.

The threads of postwar law, yakuza "uniforms" under the skin, high-profile court cases about the status of the profession or discrimination in onsens are fascinating and deserve a separate text – because that is already another era, with different debates. Today, however, we remain with the memory of the old horishi: of the people who, even before Meiji, worked semi-legally, behind a curtain, and yet so consistently that their line has survived into our times. Today’s masters, even if they use machines alongside bamboo rods, see themselves as a link in a chain stretching back to Edo.

If you now return in your mind to the opening scene – the stifling room, the sound of tebori, the back on which a dragon is being born – you may see something different than at the beginning. Not only the spectacular "armour" of scales and waves, but the very hand that repeats this gesture hundreds of thousands of times: tighten the skin, dip the needles in sumi, pierce, pull back, wipe, breathe. On the other side of that hand there has always been someone who had to clench his teeth and learn his own gaman. The horishi stands precisely between these two breaths – his own steady, trained one, and the ragged one that is trying not to betray the pain.

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